


Firsts

by Nagaina



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Gen, Linked Character Study Ficlets, No Smut, Pre-ship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-29
Updated: 2019-11-28
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:47:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21599464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nagaina/pseuds/Nagaina
Summary: A series of linked character study ficlets about, well, firsts in the growing relationship between Axel and Roxas.
Relationships: Axel & Roxas (Kingdom Hearts)
Kudos: 1





	1. First Meetings

The new XIII was not, at first glance, particularly impressive. Viewed from above, he looked small – too small, point in fact, to reach his new seat much less fill it. Which was, Axel reflected, less of a comment on the new XIII than it was an indictment of Xemnas’ deeply held need to maintain the Organization’s numerical constancy, no matter how many times he had to replace a given number. He wasn’t the first VIII, after all, and he doubted that this boy would be the last XIII.  
  
And he was a boy, probably no older than Demyx, who was jailbait to no insignificant degree. A self-possessed boy who stood there under the weight of twelve sets of eyes, some visible, some not, with no perceptible expression on his pretty mask of a face, behind his heaven-blue eyes. Blonde hair. Fair skin that seemed even paler against the black robes, the arctic white of the council chamber walls and floor. A fine bow of a mouth, drawn into a flat line that seemed oddly sad around the edges.  
  
Axel sensed something inside him, an emptiness, a blankness, that was terrible even for one of the heart-eaten. Insubstantial. He seemed insubstantial, even for a Nobody, and that was too bad for him, particularly in the World That Never Was. They were all real here, as real as the strength of their minds and their wills and whatever remnant memories they possessed could make them, and still closer to oblivion than any true person could ever come. This one was walking the edge already and all it would take was one hard shove to push him into nonexistence. Saix might enjoy that. So might Larxene. They’d make a special project of him. A quick glance around showed the others sizing up the newcomer with obvious malicious intent. Axel kept his uncovered face carefully neutral, or at least as blank as it ever got.  
  
Xemnas finally stopped speaking. Introductions were not exchanged, nor were greetings, and Axel privately wondered when their fearless leader was going to learn that publicly inducting new members into the Organization would never work out the way he wanted. Instead of relative politesse, as one could only expect of a group of heartless creatures welcoming one of their own to the fold, someone trotted out the old show us your worth with a display of strength chestnut. The floor of the council chamber was more or less immediately thronged with Dusks. Axel was busy groaning internally and rolling his eyes heavenward, and so he missed the newcomer drawing his weapon for the first time. He did not, however, miss the dazzling flash of light from the chamber floor as Jailbait XIII responded to the attack on his person with explosive violence. A handful of Dusks splattered against the walls, a double-handful more dissolved into nothing beneath the newcomer’s gleaming weapon. A ripple passed through the assembled Organization and, an eye blink later, the new XIII was surrounded again, this time by creatures of the higher orders.  
  
Axel wondered how long it would take for XIII to lose his patience. The answer was, not long at all. A dozen higher-order Nobodies dissolved and he kicked off the ground and, very much to Axel’s surprise, continued to rise, hung there in midair just out of reach, a perfectly irritated look on his face, blue eyes all narrow and bright and hot. The semblance of anger suited him, Axel decided, and ducked for cover as XIII threw, his weapon boomeranging around the room, ricocheting off thrones, smacking solidly into startled heads and midsections, deflecting off hastily summoned weapons. It returned to his waiting hand without prompting and dissolved in a bright golden-white shower of sparks.  
  
Axel would have applauded, had his arm not been numb to the shoulder from the effort it took to turn that shining blade. He settled for his best grin, directed at XIII, who returned it with a cool-eyed glare of his own. Not empty anymore. He was most definitely not empty anymore, and whatever it was that filled him burned in the backs of his eyes, nearly shone through the surface of his skin. Real and alive and vivid and Axel almost laughed out loud at the sight of the others realizing it, too.  
  
“As you can see,” Xemnas was, of course, constitutionally incapable of turning down the chance to orate, “the Key of Destiny is, despite your doubts, a formidable addition to our company.” Resentful silence greeted this statement. “Flurry of Dancing Flames, if you would be so kind, please escort our colleague to his chambers…”  
  
XIII sank to the floor and Axel leapt lightly down, gestured for the newcomer to follow. Behind them, no one moved and, as the council chamber doors closed at their backs, a number of voices rose. Axel rolled his eyes again, his gaze coming to rest on his surly, silent, still annoyed companion.  
  
“Don’t mind them – I think you made your point.” Axel took a moment to discipline his mouth, which kept wanting to grin maniacally at the mere thought. “Forcefully.”  
  
Slender shoulders rose and fell. “I hope so.”  
  
A world of threat implicit in those words. Axel somehow thought the Organization hadn’t made the best first impression.


	2. First Dance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A beach, a boy, a horde of Heartless. What more could a Nobody want?

Every member of the Organization had his or her own little hobbies, the things they did to make themselves feel more real in the tattered remnants of soul, of self, left to them. Xemnas disapproved mightily of wasting time and effort, but even he had to admit that the single-minded pursuit of their goal lacked entertainment value as far as reasons to continue existing went. For a group of people lacking one of the major fundaments of humanity and possessing assorted personality disorders of an antisocial type, an alternative outside obsession or two actually improved their functionality.  
  
Axel was privately convinced that, if he ever poked his unwanted nose in Xemnas’ personal quarters, he’d find dozens of spiral-bound notebooks full of as-yet-unused names and lugubrious poetry that not even Demyx would like. Marluxia, when he wasn’t busying himself with unacted-on plots against Xemnas, was engaged in a complex flirtation with his own demise by transparently lusting after Xemnas, all he was and all he possessed. Everyone politely pretended not to notice, then went to Luxord to lay bets on how long it would take for Saix to lose his patience and murder the Lord of Castle Oblivion in some deeply horrible manner. Saix, when he wasn’t acting as lapdog in chief, tended to lurk around Oblivion’s dungeon, not infrequently in the company of Larxene, with whom he shared a certain fascination for the physical and psychic mechanics of excruciation. Instead of working it out on each other, they constructed elaborate experiments starring whatever unfortunate they could get their hands on. For that reason, the entire Organization avoided the dungeon as a matter of self-preservation.  
  
Axel was startled to discover that Xaldin did needlepoint and Lexaeus painted and both were better at it than they had any right to be. He never even hinted that he knew, principally because he valued his existence much more than they did. Demyx had the best puppy eyes in World and used them freely on Xigbar, who seemed to consider himself Demyx’ bodyguard on his semi-frequent trips outside and was shamelessly used as a pack-bearer otherwise. They’d populated the conservatory with every species of instrument known to man at least twice. Demyx found the ones he liked, admired them for a few days or weeks, and then systematically smashed them to pieces. Except the damned sitar. Axel occasionally thought Demyx the most deeply damaged of them all, but kept those thoughts to himself.  
  
Vexen and Zexion pretended to an intellectual standard higher than anything the rest of the Organization aspired to attain. Axel knew with absolute certainty that Zexion was full of it on that issue – he’d had occasion to find himself crammed under the little freak’s bed and thereafter had great difficulty taking his coolly intellectually superior act seriously. Of them all, Vexen seemed to be exactly what he was: a heartless bastard who didn’t even miss it and who lived primarily inside his own mind. He made Axel’s skin want to crawl right off, which was no mean feat.  
  
For his own part, Axel was an inveterate people-watcher, even of people who only barely qualified for the designation under the loosest possible definition of terms. Larxene, the only other member of the Organization aware of at least part of his little diversion, disapproved heartily, though not for the reasons Axel had expected.  
  
“It’s just not healthy, Axel,” Asserted the woman whose favorite author had an entire unpleasant psychological designation named after him. “At best, it’s taking that method acting thing a little too far. At worst, it’s actively masochistic. Nothing you see, nothing you experience, when you’re out there among them will make you human again. They can’t give you your heart back. It’s pointless to try! Besides, if you want to hurt that badly…”  
  
She flicked her knives out, one by one, and the lazily contemplative look on her face suggested she was thinking about pinning him to the library wall and getting started right there. Axel couldn’t help smiling – Larxene was predictable in her viciousness but occasionally amusing nonetheless, and he only resisted patting her indulgently on the head because doing so would give her unobstructed access to his ribcage. “Two thoughts for you, my charming nymphet. One: self-mutilation becomes significantly less about the self if you involve another person in it. Two: give the good Marquis a rest and some of the weirder transhumanist philosophers a read if you want some interesting insights into the spiritually transformative nature of suffering. Have you seen XIII?”  
  
Odd how her eyes could light up and her pretty mouth scowl at the same time. “What do you want with that?”  
  
“I’m bearing a message, oh my maiden of pain, or else I wouldn’t abandon your pleasing company.” He ran a fingertip over the point of one of her still-drawn knives; she licked it clean, then dismissed it. “Orders from the Superior.”  
  
Larxene rolled her eyes. “At least he’s keeping it busy. Try the History and Geography stacks – it spends a lot of time down there.”  
  
“You’re my savior, Larxene. Next book is your choice.” He blew her a kiss and flickered away in a curl of darkness, because the library was large enough that he didn’t want to search it inch by inch on foot.  
  
He hadn’t, strictly speaking, been lying. He had been summoned into the presence of the other person who knew about his pastime and was there given a single command: “Find the Key of Destiny.” What he should do when that came to pass was not explicated and so Axel decided on the most obvious conclusion: surveillance. If XIII had outlived his usefulness – doubtful, given that he’d only been with them a fortnight at most – the order would have been completely unambiguous. And, since Xemnas rarely actually gave him permission to snoop and pry and spy on another member of the Organization, he decided to squeeze as much entertainment out of it as he could.  
  
For the first several hours, he prowled the World in methodical fashion. XIII had quarters and if he’d been in them, Axel would have been enormously disappointed. He wasn’t and neither was anything else and so the hunt continued. (The room was empty, containing not even a bed or a blanket or a single cast-off piece of clothing, only palely luminescent walls and floors and the hint of shadows lurking in the corners. Axel found himself wondering where XIII slept, if he slept, if he did anything at that could be construed as weak or human.) It became apparent, eventually, that XIII was not in the World That Never Was and hadn’t been for quite some time. He sampled the essence of XIII at his Proof – cold and bright as winter dawn, sharp as the edge of broken ice, so very strong, so totally alone – and opened a Door to Castle Oblivion, where he’d been recently enough that the taste of him still hung in the air, a taunting little curl of winter-cold and steel.  
  
Axel followed XIII’s essence-trail around the Castle and noted that its whimsical kinks and contortions seemed to be defined by an effort to avoid contact with anyone else. He even managed to evade Marluxia, a feat that Axel himself had never accomplished in Castle Oblivion and which ultimately consumed an annoying amount of time when he failed at it again. By the time he extracted himself from the Graceful Assassin’s flytraplike company, the trail was fading and Axel was becoming just suspicious enough to wonder if that might have been the point. Marluxia didn’t waste any of his barely-existent affection on the Organization’s newest member, whose mere existence seemed to be a point of not inconsiderable frustration to him. Axel didn’t think him suicidal enough that he’d actively try to do XIII harm, but absolutely knew him petty enough to torment the boy whenever possible. The Lord of Castle Oblivion excelled at that sort of thing.  
  
Similarly, Larxene nursed a grudge based on XIII’s publicly displayed ability to hit her about the head with impunity and without her express permission. And while she hadn’t technically been lying, neither was she telling a truth of recent vintage. The mustier reaches of the Castle’s enormous library were lit here and there with filaments of XIII’s winter-steel essence, but all the traces were days old. Axel commended Larxene to a number of unpleasant fates as he prowled the stacks, running his gloved fingertips across dusty spines, considering what to do next. If he’d wanted XIII dead, he’d just summon his Assassins and give them their orders. “Bring him back alive” was not, unfortunately, the sort of instruction they usually got and he seriously doubted their ability to comprehend such a command given their basic vocational design. Still…  
  
Axel found a suitably unoccupied corner and extended a call into the dark and nothingness that coiled where his heart had been. It manifested a moment later, sleek and sharp and sinuous. He extended a book on the geography of the Worlds that XIII had clearly handled more than once. “Find the one that’s not me. Lead me to him.”  
  
The Assassin slithered away with the eye-disturbing speed and boneless flexibility that characterized all its kind. Axel followed closely, watching as it caught at traces too faint for anything possessed of higher-order intelligence to notice, but well within the sense-range of things that hunted primarily by instinct. Some of those traces looked to be deliberately diminished, forced to dissolve at an unnaturally accelerated rate. Which was not, Axel reflected, a trick within Larxene’s power or, for that matter, XIII’s or he’d have used it before this. Within his own, yes. And Saix, for certain, and possibly one or two others – which gave him a theoretical list of suspects should he stumble over XIII’s fading remains but also raised more questions, the most important of which remained unanswerable.  
  
Where are you, XIII, and what are you getting yourself into?  
  
Keeping one eye on the Assassin, Axel flipped open the book. It was half excruciatingly dry geography text and half travel guide, the interesting bits being written in the margins in three different hands. He hoped that Larxene never saw that, or she’d start collecting writing samples. And then fingers. XIII’s essence-impression was strongest in the water Worlds section – he’d lingered, in particular, over a full-page picture of a long moon-silvered beach, a bucolic village clinging to the bluffs in the distance, a cluster of low, wooded islands visible just off shore…  
  
The Assassin raised the most headlike of its appendages and uttered the minor-key keen that meant it’d latched onto something solid. Axel dropped the book where Larxene was sure to find it and ran as the Assassin flowed away like a coursing-hound made of silvered darkness, down a staircase he had never seen before, out into a length of corridor that he had, and through one of the doors that lead to the outside. Beyond was a courtyard, bordered on two sides by glassed-in green house walls, in which a Door had been opened. Recently.  
  
Axel opened it, too, and found himself standing at the edge of a precipice – the vantage point from which the picture he’d just been looking at must have been taken. He was looking down on almost the same view. Almost. It was late afternoon, not moonrise, though the heavy overcast gave the beach and the sea almost the same silver sheen. In the distance, the bucolic village was in the process of collapsing in fire and ruin, he could hear the screams on the salt-and-Heartless-stench laden wind. A hundred feet below, the beach was scattered with bodies – human bodies – and swarming with Heartless in breeds and numbers too great to count in a single glance. They were forming a knot around a single focal point and in the middle of it stood XIII.  
  
He’d a Keyblade in each hand, one a blaze of wintry silver radiance, the other a flicker of purple shadow, and between them he destroying Heartless by the dozen without making any visible headway against the rising tide. Literally rising – they were coming out of the surf and out of the sand and boiling down out of the surrounding bluffs and Axel could feel them becoming aware of his own presence, as well. He called his weapons, eyeballed the range, and threw. One chakram scythed through the horde forming up at XIII’s back, carving a wide arc. The other skittered points down across the ground in front of him, striking sparks from the exposed rock of the bluffs, which exploded into a white hot sheet-wall at a silent flick of will. XIII threw a narrow-eyed glare over his shoulder as Axel came to rest at his back, a weapon in each hand, and parried it with a grin of his own. “Having fun?”  
  
XIII’s pretty bow of a mouth tightened. “What are you doing here?”  
  
“It’s not polite to answer a question with a question.” Axel threw, and a couple acres of prime oceanfront real estate became abruptly uninhabitable. “I was looking for you, actually.”  
  
XIII made a noise in his throat that might have been indicative of disbelief or just rank indifference and struck for himself, his dark Keyblade punching through the wall of fire Axel had yet to release, sending a half-dozen Heartless back to where they came from, and arcing smoothly back to his hand. “Really.”  
  
“Yes. I was afraid Marluxia might have fed you to a few of his more unpleasant plants. We can’t stay here.” Axel flicked a glance up at the precipice he’d leapt down from and XIII nodded in agreement.  
  
They moved almost as one, Axel bringing his chakrams around in a wide arc, catching the flames he’d already summoned and redirecting them, clearing a length of beach to maneuver in. XIII darted past to take advantage of it.  
  
“Watch your – “  
  
Axel swallowed what he’d been about to say, as XIII automatically checked his back swing, a little smile curling his mouth. XIII was used to fighting with someone at his back. Good to know. Also good to watch, all vicious quicksilver grace and lethal precision, with one weapon in the air and the other in his hand at all times, his face set in a tight-lipped smile, eyes wide and bright and fierce. Completely real and totally alive.  
  
Axel laughed and called down more fire.  
  
They made the bluff in two quick stages, wiping it clean of anything but themselves, though XIII did most of the hands-on work. Axel could feel his bone-weariness, though he refused to show it, standing on guard with Keyblades at the ready as he opened the Door. Axel reached out and caught him by the shoulder. “Come on. This – “  
  
The first Door opened into a place Axel had never actually been before – high buildings and a teeming mass of people that seemed thoroughly shocked when they appeared out of thin air in front of them. XIII staggered back a few paces and Axel held on tight to his hood, opened another Door –  
  
“ – is going to take – “  
  
Deep woods, quiet and still, the air thick with the scent of loam and fresh rain. Another Door.  
  
“ – a few minutes – “  
  
Darkness. Dark sea breaking on a dark shore, a cold blue moon hanging low over the water, never setting, never rising further. Another Door.  
  
“ – so they can’t follow us right back.”  
  
The World That Never Was. Axel let go of XIII’s hood before he decided to object with the edge of a Keyblade and stepped back out of easy striking range. XIII spun, his face lit by the radiance of his weapons, looking very much as though he were considering the odds of landing a hit at not-so-easy striking range as a gesture of his displeasure at being dragged across three Worlds by the scruff of his neck. Axel waited and, with an audible sigh, XIII let it go, dismissing his weapons and slumping against the nearest wall. It was interesting, Axel decided, watching how much that simple act changed him, altered the substance of him, reduced him somehow. Except the glare. The glare was still there, but even that was starting to lose its edges.  
  
“So. XIII.” He smiled, and watched XIII’s glare go from semi-hostile to somewhat wary. “You can call me Axel.”  
  
“Why,” XIII asked coolly, “would I want to do that?”  
  
“Because I’m no more a number than you are.” Axel turned, flicked a glance over his shoulder. “Coming?”  
  
“Roxas.” Softly. “My name is…Roxas.”  
  
“Roxas.” Axel let his tongue caress the syllables of that name as much as it liked. “Come on. You look like you could use a few hours of not killing anything.”  
  
Wary slid away and weary crept up underneath it. Roxas pushed himself away from the wall, submitted to a hand on his elbow to guide him and, a few minutes later, to a room with a real bed in it. He was asleep in seconds, curled up with his back reflexively toward the nearest wall, looking dangerous and half-feral and far too young, particularly in his sleep. Axel kept watch and thought about what he’d learned for certain today and what he could easily surmise and what more he had to uncover and how much fun that was going to be.  
  
Damned if he didn't have to write Xemnas a thank you note.


	3. First Lessons

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The greatest of these is trust.
> 
> Read 'Paths of Fire' next if you're interested in continuity.

Roxas possessed a perfectly sane and rational distrust of the Organization and the freaks that populated it. Axel couldn’t blame him and, in fact, shared the Key of Destiny’s general attitude toward the majority of their colleagues. He’d had longer to know them, after all.

Unfortunately, Roxas tended to lump him into the not-to-be-trusted pile except under very specific circumstances. In a fight, he was trustworthy. Roxas, once he learned that lesson, never questioned it again. The Key of Destiny gave him his back without hesitation when violence needed to be done, when destruction needed to be wrought, when a small army or two of Heartless seemed too big a bite to take on his own.

Otherwise? Not so much.

No, Axel couldn’t really blame him. But he also discovered, inside himself, the need, the persistent, damnable need, to not be looked at that way. To be trusted completely and to be worthy of that trust. It was the damnedest thing he’d ever experienced to that hour, an itch he couldn’t scratch, a form of…not satisfaction, exactly, but something very like it, that depended entirely on someone else’s acceptance, something he couldn’t control only effect. And it was making him crazy. Crazier, even.

Roxas legitimately didn’t have a lot of free time on his hands. The Superior kept him busy, running here, killing that, as though he were afraid the Key of Destiny might suddenly evaporate and take his irreplaceable talents with him. (Or at least Axel assumed them to be largely irreplaceable. Keyblade-wielding teenagers weren’t exactly crawling out of the faintly luminous paneling, after all.) On the rare occasions that he wasn’t feeding the Heart, Roxas tended to haunt the halls of Castle Oblivion, particularly wherever the library happened to be at any given time. He seemed to navigate Oblivion’s constantly shifting internal landscape with greater ease than most, or at least better than anyone who didn’t enjoy Marluxia’s particular favor.

Unless it was to receive orders or possibly to rest, he didn’t usually loiter in the World That Never Was, which made attempting to ambush him someplace he returned to regularly a pain in the ass. Axel didn’t enjoy Marluxia’s favor in any way, shape, or form and occasionally went out of his way to avoid obtaining it. Consequently, the halls of Castle Oblivion rendered him no assistance whatsoever and frequently went out of their way to thwart him in his self-assigned mission. If Marluxia hadn’t already been on Axel’s ‘kill sometime in the nearish future’ list, that little fact would have landed him there, if for no other reason than the fact that it forced him to swallow his pride and go to Larxene for help.

“Oh, dear.” Larxene smiled, the expression Axel imagined gracing an immediately post-coital female praying mantis. “You’re so going to pay for this, you realize?”

He’d actually caught her outside Castle Oblivion, coming from the Castle That Never Was, and executed a flawless pounce and grab at the entrance to a suitably dark alley. She put up a token struggle that involved a lot of indignant squeaking and two painful but nonlethal stab wounds. “What, I haven’t paid enough already?”

“Consider that money down.” She licked her knives clean and flicked them away, extracting the object of his request from her sleeve as she did so. “I really shouldn’t give this to you, you know. It’d be so much more entertaining to make you go crawling to Marluxia…”

Axel stripped off his gloves and ran his fingertips through the blood she’d drawn; her eyes followed their progress. “You know that would never happen, no matter how desperate I am.” He curled his fingers in, painted his palm in his own blood, watched a little shiver run through her. “Do you really want me to beg, my maiden of pain?”

She wet her lips with a tongue still stained faintly crimson. “I’ll settle for asking nicely.”

He pressed her against the alley wall and the last of the space from between their bodies, bent and murmured against her ear, “May I please have my library card back?”

Larxene flushed from somewhere below the neck of her robe to the roots of her fine blonde hair and handed it over; he made sure to trace his fingers over hers as she did so. “One day, you’ll have to tell me what he did to make you hate him so much.”

“I don’t hate him, Larxene.” He stepped back, opened a Door. “I couldn’t if wanted to. I just don’t care if he lives or dies.”

Not entirely true, but close enough to satisfy Larxene. Axel took to haunting the library when he wasn’t otherwise engaged and, eventually, his patience was rewarded.

“Dare I ask what you’re looking for?” Roxas didn’t even have the common decency to look surprised when Axel manifested out of thin air at his side, though he did get a sidelong Glare of Death for his troubles.

After a moment, he also got a grudging answer. “Something familiar.”

“You won’t find that here.” That earned a full-on Icy Look of Extremely Imminent Pain. “Trust me on this one.”

“You don’t ask for much, do you.” Even when the Key of Destiny was asking a question, he sounded as though he were delivering a statement, almost as though he didn’t recall the manifold uses of tone and inflection. He might not.

“In this case? No.” Axel dug around for a moment inside his robe, and came up with what he was looking for. “Catch.”

Roxas’ swordsman reflexes snatched the object out of mid-air and he examined it with an actual expression. Confusion. It was a bottle, blue glass full of air bubbles, half-full of sand and tiny pebbles and bits of seashell, sealed with a cork. He opened it, and a salty tang filled the air between them. He looked up, blue-blue eyes full of questions.

“You won’t find what you’re looking for here,” Axel informed him quietly, “because this place, in its own way, is even less real than we are. Books, walls, corridors, furniture – everything here – might be physical, might feel and look and smell real enough, but that’s because Marluxia lets you feel it. His will permits you to find what you’re expecting to find, or what you might happen to be looking for or not, as he sees fit. And if he doesn’t see fit, all you’ll find are lies.”

Those eyes narrowed as the implications stole over him. “I suppose I should thank you.”

Axel shrugged, and found the unpleasantly cold and sharp edge of that dark Keyblade resting against his neck, flat against his shoulder, before he finished the gesture. Faster than he could blink. A smile curled the corners of his mouth.

“Why?” A real question, at last. “Why are you telling me this? Why do you even – “ He stopped, a flicker of something crossed his face, and held what he’d been about to say.

An honest question deserved an honest answer, or at least the facsimile of one. “At first? I was ordered to find you, the unspoken implication being that I should keep you out of trouble. Now?” He let the smile stretch into a real grin, one that reached up into his eyes. “It’s more fun getting into trouble with you than trying to get in your way.”

The normally rock-steady hand holding that blade wavered, just enough to trace a razor-thin line across the skin it rested on. “Trust you, hm?”

“You have to trust a body, even a Nobody, some time.” He let the grin slide away, rested the back of one gloved hand against the flat of the Keyblade, pushed once, gently. “Roxas. If you won’t trust me, at least pretend to believe me a little.”

A sigh. The Key of Destiny’s hand fell back to his side, empty, and Axel took the opportunity to work some warmth back into his cold-numbed shoulder.

“I…” Roxas began. Stopped. Began again, more quietly, so Axel had to step closer to hear him. “It…doesn’t feel right. To be alone.” He looked up, a quick searching glance, and then back at the bottle in his hand. “I don’t know why.”

“’Why’ we can work on.” Axel replied, in the same low tone. “If you want.”

“I think I’d…like that.” A smile came and went, so fast Axel almost thought he’d imagined it, until Roxas looked up with the brilliance of it still lingering in his eyes. “What’s this for?”

Axel caught his breath and covered it with a flash-grin of his own. “Something to remember our first real time together. A memento.”

“Oh, like I’d forget that.” The bottle disappeared inside his robe, nonetheless. “Ten thousand Heartless and you.”

“You might be surprised. Come on – any minute now I’ll overstay my welcome, Marluxia will yank my library card again, and we’ll spend the rest of the night on a scenic tour of Castle Oblivion’s many fine broom closets. Middens. Abattoirs. I’m sure he’s got an oubliette in here, somewhere, that’s just the sort of thing he’d go for.” He rested a hand in the small of Roxas’ back and steered him in the direction of the nearest Door.

Roxas glanced over his shoulder as the Door, not leading to a broom closet, blossomed around them. “One day, you’ll have to tell my why you hate him so much.”

“One day, I might.”


End file.
